Eddie 'The Duke' Baroo makes a point on HG Nelson (aka Greig Pickhaver) while Matt Parkinson looks on
Source:
The Australian

IT'S always good to see HGNelson (aka the affable and surrealistically erudite Greig Pickhaver) back on the goggle box; his crescendos of comic abuse never fail to get a laugh.

Political cartoonist Bill Leak, who should know, suggested recently that Nelson had elevated the diatribe to high art in his work with rampaging Roy Slaven on their Sunday afternoon radio sports show, This Sporting Life, and their highly successful Olympic television broadcasts.

"He analyses, absorbs and then deploys the vocabulary, or jargon, of his audience with such authority that they immediately accept him as one of their own," Leak said. "Holding up the warped mirror, he gives them the opportunity to bellow with laughter as they recognise their own distorted, exaggerated selves."

Now Nelson's doing it again as host of Comedy Slapdown on pay TV's the Comedy Channel, and bringing a hilarious, seasoned schtick to the proceedings. He has been playing ringmaster to Slaven's shenanigans for so long, he has honed his ability to maintain vein-popping intensity while ever so subtly winking at the audience. Comedy Slapdown brings the high-wire art of improvisation to local TV, pitting comics against each other in a weekly mock game show, with hand slaps and body rolls echoing the style of World Wrestling Entertainment.

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This is a nice, colourful gimmick, anchoring the ephemeral slickness of improv, as practitioners call it. Because of its riskiness, raggedness and looseness, impromptu comedy has been difficult to translate to TV. Shows built around improv have usually emanated from Drew Carey's Whose Line Is It Anyway, a combination of game and stand-up comedy show in which contestants improvised scenes in theatre-sports style games.

In Slapdown Comedy, improv is staged within the wrestling framework without scripts, cue cards or laugh tracks, in front of a live audience, with musician John Thorn providing riotous carnival music. It's more spontaneous than Working Dog's successful Thank God You're Here, which combines the wackiness of an improv show, also staged in front of a live audience, with the stability of scripted comedy.

On that show, celebrity comics, squeezed into often outlandish costumes, are thrown into comedic chaos and forced to respond to wacky scenarios unprepared. Supporting them are actors who have learned parts to a script and prompt the arrivals at what they call "the bus stops" or "points of jeopardy" in the evolving scene.

By contrast, the completely unscripted Comedy Slapdown sees five teams competing through the series in a round-robin style tournament set between the ropes of a wrestling arena.

Each show sees two teams of three comic improvisers leaping into the ring and going head to head in a series of sometimes hysterically convoluted, spontaneous games. No writers' support is involved, just clever minds reacting to contrived situations.

The winning team from each show moves a step closer to the final, in which the two funniest play off in a title fight finale. Team players in the first episode are Tom Gleeson, Rebecca De Unamuno and Russell Fletcher, who constitute the Trio of Doom; Julia Zemiro, Stephen Gates and Rik Brown are the Dirty Hombres. While all are practised on the live comedy circuit and most are trained improvisers, only Zemiro, host of SBS's RocKwiz, is familiar to TV audiences, though the others are vaguely recognisable from guest appearances on Rove.

Improvised theatre has always relied on pre-composed comic phrases and situations that can be combined in an infinite variety of ways. They are what comedian Shelly Berman calls "your safeties", structuring constraints that reduce the risk of the improvisation failing.

Nelson, as King of the Ring, oversees proceedings on the mat of mayhem and mirth, scooting pell-mell into the action, his rushing walk a shambling, jaunty affair. "Welcome to the Tepee of Hee Hee, the Tent of Bent, the Dome of Debaucher," he shouts at the start, setting the carnival spirit.

Sometimes, as Nelson introduces the complicated sketches, incredulity rampant, he hurtles around the ring with such raucous energy, you expect the show to finish in bedlam. His whole body seems to explode, his inquisitive eyes appear attached to invisible springs and his semaphoric arms seem longer than they really are as he waves his running sheets at the cameras.

Happily he doesn't always upstage the comedians, although only the women, Zemiro and De Unamuno, have the airiness and vivacity to share his stage. The others, perhaps wisely, ignore the overriding conceit of WrestleMania spectacle, that once highly popular ritual involving the enactment of suffering. Only the women develop larger-than-life personalities, with the necessary physical attributes to support them.

The best segments, and there are many in the hour, crackle with jazzy humour. The chaos and feeling of risk, the air of fallibility on the actors' part, create an excitement the audience can sense.

And part of the fun is Nelson's crazy forays into the crowd, popping questions and thrusting his microphone into the faces of startled young women. Everyone in the watching mob, of course, really wants the comics to fail, to dry up.

After all, they stand there believing that without any real props, costumes, stunts or special effects they can entertain a vast, unwieldy group through the force of their personalities.

Like nightclub hecklers, the audience, in the studio and at home, want to drag the smart-arses back down to earth where they belong with the rest of us. As does the regular judge, urbane comedian Matt Parkinson, dressed in a formal crimson suit with a frilly pink shirt and bow tie, who never stops trying to upstage or humiliate his fellow comics from the adjudication bench. He is the barometer of public opinion, rubbing his hands together with malicious satisfaction.

When it settles down, Comedy Slapdown should make for great TV. This kind of comedy feeds off the subject matter of the day, reinterpreting it with a dynamic relevance and immediacy that other forms of pop culture, such as the sitcom or the drama, fail to achieve.

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